Opposing View on Football

Some time ago, I ran across a Time magazine dated February 2010. It carried a story titled, “The Problem with Football.” The title piqued my curiosity as I detest pro sports any way and wanted to hear whatever bad this guy had to say. I was certainly pleased that there are real people who understand pro sports in all its exorbitant symbolisms. There are people besides myself that see pro sports as a royal extravaganza strewn with the broken bodies and damaged brains when athletes collide, often creating violent collisions in pursuit of glory.

It is a form of entertainment that parallels the gladiators of Rome. During the Roman rule, the lions and men with spears and swords created bodies for the amusement of the crowds. So what’s changed? In our coliseums we don’t kill our gladiators, we just turn their brains to jelly. Now and then a gladiator does fall victim to extreme trauma.

High school football players alone suffer forty-three thousand to sixty-seven thousand concussions a year, as per Time magazine.

You, as a paying spectator, encourage football and are knowingly or unknowingly attributing to the thousands of mentally and physically destroyed human beings each year. I would suggest you look up on your computer or library or dig up a Time magazine of February 2010 and read about how dangerous football is for the players.

Those who play the game see only dollar signs. Those who watch the game subsidize and encourage the hell and trauma that await the players who are at risk of concussion. But then again, each player is always at risk. In the long run, football is a high-risk endeavor, and there are thousands out there that wish they had taken up tennis.

I find football to be adolescent at best and fundamentally simple-minded on both the players and spectators point of view. The players seek glory. The spectators seek mayhem and raw power and fantasize that it is they who are running and pummeling the man with the ball. I find pro sports to be an enigma—something to be avoided.